Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Around The Blogoverse

Ichiro's Edge

Hardball Times has an honest-to-God Bill James column outlining why Ichiro's pending supercession of George Sisler's single-season hit record of 257 is a lot easier than you might have thought. Simply, the difference between a 154-game season and a 162 game season is gigantic, making the task approximately nine times more likely.

Padres Transactions

Kotchman in Purgatory

Sean condemns über-prospect Casey Kotchman, saying he "is not going to make any significant contributions to this club." Hopefully that's only true this year. Certainly, I haven't been impressed with him in his starts, and haven't been shy about wanting him to correct his problems in the minors. Unfortunately, the Angels have a problem there, too: Salt Lake is a hitter's park, just as the mainly high-elevation PCL is a hitter's league. It's not going to help him that he'll see flattened curveballs and sliders, and sending the kid back to school in AA won't be useful, either. We may not get a choice but to see him ground out weakly for a time.

How The Giants Blew It

Orlando Cepeda is at bat with the bases jammed.
Orlando Cepeda, with a wham, bam, he hit a grand slam.

The Giants moved to the west coast at the same time as the Dodgers; back in New York, they were the dominant franchise, but once transliterated forty degrees or so west, the club has stumbled, never quite getting a World Series victory in the nearly fifty years since moving. Hardball Times has an article on the squandering of the club's 1958 assets. "Flushed with a pool of wondrous talent, the Giants struggled to make logical and firm decisions regarding how to deploy it, and through a series of extremely wasteful and sometimes pointless trades, they frittered much of the talent away." Good reading, especially if you believe, as one commenter on El Lefty Malo put it, that ex-Giant Neifi Perez's 8-14 run as a Cub indicates that "there is a God. And he hates the Giants."

I wouldn’t agree with Sean’s assessment that Kotchman looked “totally overmatched” last night. He showed decent pitch recognition, and worked himself into a couple of good counts in that game (though his eye is nothing like the hype would suggest). I suppose that he could have been referring to Kotchman’s handling of breaking pitches, which was horrible to say the least.

Kotchman is clearly not ready for the show, but it is waaaay too early in his career to even think about writing him off.